Founded in 2010, Adaptly partners with some of the leading digital platforms, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Instagram and Snapchat, for a client roster that includes Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint.

“What attracted Accenture Interactive Operations was the fact that they really are leaders in terms of the whole platformization of marketing,” Mendonca explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “They really know how to leverage platforms properly to be able to give a step change in business outcomes.”

Adaptly will significantly bolster the capabilities of Accenture Interactive Programmatic Services, whose core offerings are helping marketers in-house programmatic media; media strategy, planning and activation; and adtech implementation and support.

“We’re very much starting with the world of programmatic delivery because we do firmly believe that all media will be programmatically delivered” as early as 2025, inclusive of TV, Mendonca says. “That’s really where our lens is so we’re starting first with programmatic activation and then we’ll scale that through to myriad number of touchpoints including TV, outdoor, radio, et cetera.”

The acquisition of Adaptly comes as Accenture is creating “experience activation centers” for clients “everywhere from Warsaw to Sao Paolo. What we’re finding is our clients really want us to have a very integrated offering across all paid, owned and earned channels and touchpoints, and that’s really what we’re focused on.”

In all, Accenture has “a whole scaled operation” of 16,000 people across the globe “developing new marketing operating models for clients and new solutions to their growth challenges.”

Because content lies at the heart of marketing experience activation, “We very much are building our product and service offering around a data-driven, tech-enabled content powered way of going to market, which is exactly what are clients are asking for.” Even when building new marketing models, “building a new content operating model is at the heart of that solution,” says Mendonca.

What should be a constant is that any form of brand communication “is actually more engaging and enhances the customer experience,” she adds, “to make sure that advertising is not a tax and it’s not an annoyance for the consumer because ad blocking is only going one way.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Since gaining, keeping and growing customers involve different phases, being able to discern them leads to knowing what messaging to deliver across platforms. “Linking those two things up we think is the next phase of where the business is going,” Spengler opines in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “It’s data, but then you have to know what to say and it’s creativity.”

Powering much of this progress within Dentsu is the M1 platform developed by the Merkle agency prior to its acquisition by Dentsu in 2016. M1 now has an identity graph that comprises 95% of U.S. adults by way of personally identifiable information codes, according to Spengler.

“That gives us a tremendous ability to work with our clients to identify true targets based on all the data they would want to know about somebody,” and then to figure out “how to connect them at various end points so we can actually speak to those exact people. So it’s making media more precise and more powerful.”

Part of the process is connecting audiences with media owners. “The conversation we’re having is about audiences, it’s less about GRP’s,” Spengler says. “It’s about content and environment, because content and context will always be important. We’re coming together on that.”

Understanding the differences among audiences goes hand in hand with being able to determine how specific targets are consuming media, according to Spengler.

“You’ve got five different devices. Am I going to waste money and talk to you five different times when I only want to talk to you once? So you’ve got to really understand who you are and what device you’re on so we’re not wasting the money.”

Asked about the value that media agencies need to provide, Spengler says “It’s very complex. It used to be strategy and save me money.” Now its data, technology and creativity working together.

“It’s higher level work but that’s what our clients need and that’s what we’re trying to build ourselves to be able to deliver.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“This isn’t some fad, some flash in the pan,” Kawaja says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

While it’s still early days in the sector, “We are seeing companies in a variety of verticals, in a relatively short period of time with relatively little capital, garner significant market share, in some cases double digit-market share, away from category incumbents who have been building their brand equity for decades.”

In its D2C BRAND LUMAscape, the investment banking firm identifies more than 400 direct-to-consumer companies. The overwhelming majority are in clothing and apparel, followed by personal/family care and home/furnishings, then food/ drink and travel.

The rise of these companies “has major implications for the marketing world writ large, and our message to traditional marketers is don’t take this lying down,” Kawaja says. “Take a good hard look at what is causing the success of these startups because yes, while like any tech ecosystem, many of them will die but some will live and become major competitors.”

It comes down to a build-versus-buy scenario, but it can be very hard for legacy marketers to create a cool, new direct-to-consumer brand, according to Kawaja. His hypothetical example is a company selling a high-margin product through traditional means. “It’s like having a virus. The antibodies will come out and kill it. Good luck with your new division that’s going to circumvent that and disrupt that. That’s hard for a legacy company to do.”

Companies that have opted for buy versus build include Walmart and its acquisition of Jet.com for $3.3 billion. “Now they’re sort of infusing the culture that Mark Lore developed at Jet to drive Walmart’s broader ecommerce business.

Then there are Unilever and Dollar Shave Club and Procter & Gamble’s purchase of natural deodorant brand. These and other well-established companies “are capturing the growth, capturing the magic if you will, of these DTC brands. Not just for the business per se, but also to sort of infuse that thinking, that culture, that approach to the marketplace,” says Kawaja.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“Before us there was YouTube and Netflix and that was it,” says Chief Revenue Officer Mark Rotblat. “We are across all the major platforms, eighteen of them, mostly on televisions.”

Those platforms include Roku, Amazon Fire, Samsung and Sony smart TV’s, along with gaming consoles, mobile devices and Android TV. In November of 2018, Tubi expanded its footprint by adding 20 million homes in the Comcast Xfinity X1 footprint.

A free app for a service that doesn’t require subscriptions, Tubi sells adds through both programmatic partner channels and direct to agencies and marketers, Rotblat explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “Really, whichever model works best for the buyer. What they love is that it’s only movies and TV shows.”

Since there’s no digital short-form content among the more than 9,000 movie and TV titles available on Tubi, “It really looks like what they buy in television and it solves the problem of linear ratings in decline, making it harder for them to reach their target audience through linear. It’s the cord cutters and cord nevers that are spending more and more time in OTT,” says Rotblat.

Asked about the growing number of direct-to-consumer video services slated for launch by major media companies, Rotblat says, “You’ll see in all these announcements are subscription services. Whether it’s skinny bundles or otherwise, there’s competition for that type of content. But we’re really feeling that there’s going to be some subscription fatigue.”

He describes Tubi viewers as “media enthusiasts who typically have one or two subscriptions “and they kind of bounce around. They might have Showtime for a month, Hulu for a month for this show. But we’re kind of the consistent that they know they can go and find just a massive library and it’s free. They’re willing to have ads if it’s a light ad load that’s unobtrusive.”

Tubi’s ad load around four to six minutes an hour, about a third of what’s on linear TV, according to Rotblat. Ad inventory is mainly 15- and 30-second ads managed through the company’s own ad server, “and we have on average three to five ads per pod every fifteen minutes or so.”

Tubi is similar to Pluto TV, which was recently acquired by Viacom for $340 million. Pluto TV is expected to complement Viacom’s cable distribution, as USA TODAY reports.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Beck talks about research Turner recently conducted to see what’s top of mind with viewers who face an ever-expanding roster of streaming choices, some of them without advertising.

“The research we did recently is very interesting,” says Beck. “People kept going back to trying to simply discover content has become more of a challenge because there’s so much out there. What can I watch and where can I watch it? And by the way, do I have to pay incremental for it?”

Among the research learnings was that people want more relevant viewing recommendations in a world of increased co-viewing wherein “typically you’re getting a recommendation based on a single profile when you have multiple people who are interested in what the content is,” Beck says. “Why can’t we have recommendations that are based on multiple profiles?”

But recommendations come with nuances, he adds, one example being not everyone who likes comedy programming likes dark comedic material. “The ability to go more granular in search to really get to what you’re looking for is going to be important.”

Another research finding that stood out is “there’s so much clutter in the experience today. When you open up any screen, there’s that infinite scrolling of content and how do you de-clutter that? So I think there’s going to be a lot of focus on UI, UX to make more personalized experiences for people,” says Beck.

Asked about reducing ad loads and other ways to improve viewing experiences, he notes that while Amazon, Netflix and others have done well without ads, Hulu has done well with an ad model.

“I think a lot of the services are going to have to consider is there an ad-supported model. Consumers may be very open to that, especially if the ads get better. By better I don’t just mean the quality of the content but not as interruptive or served at the times in which people are open to that.

“I definitely think that anybody that’s in this space is thinking hard about how can advertisers help fund the experience for consumers because we know consumers are going to want a free or ad-supported version.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Its goal is to “evolve the consumer experience of watching live, primetime television into a better experience because we know that they have an immense amount of options to be able to watch television,” says Mark Marshall, NBCU’s President of Advertising & Client Partnerships.

Along the way, NBCU has trimmed ad loads to evolve the consumer experience. The days of 42 minutes of content and 18 minutes of interruption “are going to have to be behind us if we want to continue to make this ad sales ecosystem continue to be healthy,” Marshall adds in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

Reducing ad loads began two years ago when the company trimmed 35% from its digital properties. Last year NBCU said it had cut 10% out of its top 50 shows across eight networks.

In sports programming, it faces restrictions but “we’ve tried some different things,” says Marshall. One is during hockey games, “when a puck is iced and we have the transition before the next face-off of having a drop in-ad in that period of time. It’s in the flow of the sport, it’s not disruptive and it actually has performed very well for us.”

On the segmentation side, worked with an outside firm to create a tool called the “content code.” Starting in primetime, NBCU wanted to figure out not only why people were coming to its shows but what mood they were in when they were watching. “And then we layered on top of that what ads performed best within that. Putting the right tone of the right ad in the right show we saw the brand metrics jump.”

This year, it will continue to refine its artificial intelligence-informed optimization to target ads down to the scene level. “Our goal is to make to advertising as effective as possible. And we know that it does two things. It works for brand metrics and it also helps with retention, making sure people stay with it,” Marshall says.

Meanwhile, “challenger” brands like Peloton have added TV to their options “ and they talk in terms of how it really influenced their brand as soon as they went on television.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Meanwhile, advertising sales rose to just under $1.5 billion from $1 billion. “We’re getting TV’s largest advertisers,” says Naylor, while direct-to-consumer brand revenue grew 86% “and we’re super serving them with some new tools.”

Foremost in that expanding toolkit is an attribution offering from the company owned by Comcast, Fox and Disney plus an ad format that would appear when Hulu viewers pause what they’re watching.

Hulu will develop customized attribution deals depending on the types of customer-relationship data its advertisers can share—information can be matched with customer behavior metrics from Hulu, as Variety reports.

“We can elegantly put our census level data with their census level data” resulting in a “census-to-census marriage of the data to show that an exposure resulted in a sale,” says Naylor.

Working with Telaria, Hulu is enhancing its programmatic private marketplace for ad inventory so that “we can put people in a biddable environment for the most coveted segments.” It’s a closed market because “we’re very protective” to avoid “category collision with our advertisers” and to be able to fully vet the ad creative, Naylor adds.

“Happily, the majority of people choose the advertising-supported Hulu but that doesn’t mean we can just feel free to just jam ads at them. If anything, we have to be as respectful as possible because they’re one click away from going to the commercial-free Hulu.” While the company is “conventional TV with conventional breaks,” it welcomes ads of any duration plus interactive units, working with partners like BrightLine and Innovid.

The “latest kid on the block” that Hulu is beta testing is “a pause ad.” When viewers hit the pause button “we’re going to serve up a little image” but not a display or video ad. “Imagine a Coke can with language like ‘the pause that refreshes.’”

The goal is to exploit the opportunity of “knowing situationally what viewers are up to with kind of a respectful ad execution. It’s an experiment that we can take because of who we are,” Naylor says.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“There’s a functional need for our product in the market and an emotional one and a community to belong to,” Away VP of Brand Marketing Selena Kalvaria says in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “The problem is we haven’t reached all those people.”

Away’s experience with television thus far has focused on direct response. This year it’s looking to find out “what other roles can TV play, not just reach but driving culture, emotional resonance and return on brand equity via premium programming,” says Kalvaria.

“How do we start to think about the full marketing funnel, the full strategy, in order to grow our reach and to really be able to have those conversations with those people?” she says. “And at the same time think about how that impacts and actually makes our bottom of the funnel more efficient.”

It’s not just about commercials per se but “there is customer alignment, there’s emotional alignment, there’s values alignment” while creating “mental availability,” another term for getting into more peoples’ purchase consideration set.

While most direct-to-consumer companies think about channels they can measure easily, Kalvaria embraces traditional brand health metrics. “Awareness, consideration and ultimately market penetration.” For her, consideration is one of the biggest metrics for a brand whose key brand attributes include being stylish, innovative and unique.

“How are we moving those metrics through the stories that we tell on television, through the stories that we tell through upper funnel?” asks Kalvaria. “As your awareness and your consideration moves, your penetration will move too and that’s your bottom funnel.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

In this interview with Beet.TV, U.S. CEO Gerhart discusses the “perfect balance” between TV’s scale and addressability along with the challenge that accompanies the need for increasing amounts of consumer data for targeting purposes.

“One of the biggest things that we’re starting to see is the unbundling of services,” says Gerhart, citing the Consumer Technology Association’s projection of a 27% increase in streaming revenue in 2019. “That’s huge and it has massive implications when you think about the control that it gives to consumers in terms of building their own packages with their own channels, their own networks.”

Byproducts of this customization can be positive or negative. Among the former is greater fragmentation, while the latter includes “understanding more about who those consumers are through the data that we have, from the suppliers providers and carriers that are actually starting to create some of those bundles,” Gerhart says.

He sees opportunity in the “perfect balance between the scale that TV can afford and actually the addressability that it creates. I don’t think we have many clients that are on one extreme or the other.”

Mindshare has a lot of small “challenger brands” that use addressable TV and new technologies to precisely target people who may be in market for a particular product or service. Then there are clients that need traditional scale and eyeballs, reach and impressions.

“And it’s the combination of those two and understanding where and how they intersect, that’s the art and science of what we do,” Gerhart says.

He believes there’s a paradox now in that “everybody wants to be as addressable and precise as possible. But in order to do that it means that we need more data and more information from consumers from providers, third party, first party, you name it. That’s the tension that we’re constantly faced with.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

The end goal is “how you can get a holistic view from television viewing across the same audiences across different platforms into one place so you can offer video viewing to the buyers in a more holistic fashion,” Clarken adds in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

Nielsen has been working the industry on cross-platform measurement “and it’s been complicated.” Signs of encouragement, according to Clarken, include the “fantastic job” that Linda Yaccarino and her team have created in the form of CFlight.

Within CFlight, Nielsen provides foundational data from its traditional television ratings plus Digital Ad Ratings and Total Ad Ratings “as the underlying data, and then they put those things together inside of this platform. It’s great. It’s a place where it’s a starting point,” says Clarken.

“I think it’s great for the industry. It shows movement across a problem that’s been there for some time where there hasn’t been movement. We’d love to continue to work with them and see how this can be adopted more broadly.”

She considers calculating cross-platform reach and frequency as “the first place to start. How many people saw it, how often did they see it, how long did they see it for. And that provides an underlying platform for everything else.

“And what’s really important is that when you measure reach and frequency across platforms you’re doing it in a comparable way. Buyers want holistic view. They don’t want to try to cobble together their TV data with the data from mobile, with the data from PC, with data from multiple providers to try to get some sense of their ad spend on video themselves.”

As more advertisers extend their audience targeting beyond age and gender into different demographics and biographics, the next step is to show actual business outcomes.

“You have to start with the base before you can get to the sales targets, but ultimately the holy grail is to put the base in place and then start to building the pieces on top of that to the ultimate outcome. Which is did I actually sell something on the back of my advertising,” says Clarken.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Roughly four months after AT&T unveiled Xandr, the company announced in early January an integration with WarnerMedia’s Turner to improve the relevancy of advertising, fueled by data and content connections.

In this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, Welday talks about the new collaboration with Turner along with the high-level aspiration of Xander to make advertising more relevant while leveraging nearly 200 million consumer billing relationships that yield fertile data for both buyers and sellers.

And then there are viewers of premium video content, whose needs are a high priority. “Consumers should not have to tolerate sixteen minutes of un-targeted advertising for every hour of programming,” Welday says. “That’s a widely agreed upon problem. We think we can help with that.”

The Turner and Xandr ad sales teams have been working on the following four initiatives, with several enhanced products now available from Turner:

• More relevant advertising across Turner’s TV brands, with AT&T first-party set-top-box data

• Using Xandr’s data capabilities to fuel more relevant advertising on Turner’s digital properties

• Expanding the reach of branded storytelling to addressable TV

• Proving the impact of advertising through attribution

Elsewhere within the AT&T fold, Xander is using some of its audience targeting segment capabilities to inform both CNN digital and Bleacher Report across linear and digital. Meanwhile, it’s assisting the LaunchPad branded content solution extend into addressable. “So we can take the same audience they’re targeting with the branded content and find them on our addressable footprint,” Welday says.

Asked about Xandr’s desire to be a supply-side platform for competitors, Welday says it’s “very, very grateful” to be representing both Altice USA and Frontier Communications, with which it has agreements to aggregate and sell national addressable TV advertising inventory.

“Our intention is to build a marketplace where we can provide premium content in a brand-safe environment with visibility and transparency into how the campaign is being delivered across platforms. That by definition is open. We want all comers to be able to access that marketplace,” says Welday.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

The bottom line, Sable explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019, is that TV advertising will need to rise to the quality level of the programs themselves.

Noting that he predicted 10 years ago that Amazon would have brick-and-mortar stores, Sable says, “Netflix within the next two years will have advertising. They have to, in my view. Amazon’s already going to be there.”

This means “we’re going to have more and more opportunities to put more and more great advertising” around premium content.

A once widely held view that with the rise of digital most video content would be user-generated hasn’t quite worked out, according to Sable, citing “the cat peeing on your shoes that everybody would share. That’s such crap. It’s exactly the opposite.”

In recent years, producers who once shunned TV are flocking to its seemingly endless channels. “They all want to be back in TV because the budgets are high, the production quality is huge,” Sable says.

Of course, someone has to pay for all that content and “advertising has to be as good as the content that you put it around.”

While for many of Y&R’s clients TV “has to be that branded piece, to create the brand image,” more companies beginning to understand that “Amazon is DTC and so is e-commerce.”

With a drive toward direct-to-consumer even in staid consumer packaged-goods categories, there’s more concern now about “how do my ads look different, how do they sound different, what’s the call to action, what’s the offer? What’s the pricing. These have to be in there,” Sable says. “You see it with the Warby Parkers, you see it with the Caspers.”

Even companies like Facebook and Amazon are buying “a ton” of traditional TV. “How come they’re not just on Google or Facebook or Amazon? Because they’re smart.”

Asked about the proceedings at CES, Sable prefers to think of the annual event as more about innovation than technology per se. While he was impressed by a new LG screen that folds up like a window shade, he’d like to see more visibility around 5G cellular service “because so much of what we’ve seen is going to be dependent on 5G.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“We Believe defies the convention that ‘boys will be boys,’ which is just an excuse for bad behavior,” P&G Chief Brand Officer said in an email to Beet.TV. “Although many examples exist where men are NOT at their best, we believe in the best in men and that by holding each other accountable, eliminating excuses for bad behavior and being a role model for a new generation we can deliver positive and lasting change.”

In this interview at CES 2019, Pritchard explains P&G’s work with the Association of National Advertisers’ CMO Growth Council in the area of society and sustainability. Among other goals, the company is focusing on racial equality “both in the advertising and content that we create, but also behind the camera so we can really create much greater degree of equality, diversity and inclusion throughout our entire creative supply chain.”

At the 2018 Cannes Lions, racial equality was the subject of an initiative by I.D.E.A. hosted by Spotify and P&G and sponsored by true[X]. This Beet.TV series from the event features a range of industry executives discussing how their companies are promoting racial diversity.

The purpose of We Believe is to inspire men to be part of the solution by moving from “inaction to being a role model for positive action for themselves, their loved ones, their peers, and for the next generation of men.” To support that effort, Gillette has launched thebestmencanbe.org, which includes a commitment to donate at least $1 million each year, for the next three years, to organizations with programs that help men of all ages achieve their personal “best,” starting with the Boys & Girls Club of America.

“I’m quite proud of this campaign and of the Gillette team, their partners at Grey, and film director Kim Gehrig (who we discovered through Free The Bid) for redefining what it means to be “The Best a Man Can Get,” Pritchard said in his email.

Pritchard’s desire is that all companies get involved in such movements as the ANA’s #SeeHer and its Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing.

“Because if everybody in the industry is involved it will truly change the way all people view the world.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“We feel great. It’s really a time of technology sophistication where it’s intersecting with creativity,” says the Chairman of Advertising Sales & Client Partnerships at NBCUniversal—the “largest legacy content company.”

Whereas TV used to be the sole province of big brands behind a “velvet rope,” the evolution of the medium is ushering in a new wave of entrepreneurs seeking the advantages of co-mingling with premium content, Yaccarino explains in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

“No one ever argues that’s the best performing opportunity, but now as TV’s gotten smarter we’ve invited in a whole new crop of brands that are able to expand into a space they once thought unattainable.”

Newer brands bring with them an expectation to break out “beyond the limitations that they’re experiencing from solely being a performance based marketer” but without some of the strictures that have long governed TV advertising, according to Yaccarino.

“You can only survive in point-and-click or performance-based marketing platforms and grow to a certain point. Then you start to hit a ceiling.”

What these brands do expect is business performance without any legacy hesitation. “We’re on a playing field that’s not officiated by an obsolete success metric, whether it is a currency of a rating or the legacy that’s held our industry back or the inertia that’s held us back from past business practices,” says Yaccarino.

Asked to comment about controversies that continue to bedevil some of the biggest digital media platforms, she demurs while calling NBCU a worry free zone.

“But I have to say that the transition that once was taking your media mix to the shiny new toys of the new social platforms, or that were new back then, and the promise of media effectiveness and efficiency and the disappointment that then followed, that pendulum has swung back.”

Noting that the live linear TV experience is “very imperfect,” reducing commercial load has brought improvements for viewers and advertisers. “The brand metrics consistently across the board have exceeded our expectations.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“What we want to do is use technology to be able to make everyday life just a little bit better with our everyday household and personal care products,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual CES event.

“We studied Silicon Valley because what we knew we needed to do is we needed to move faster. We knew technology was disrupting everything,” he says. “That has spawned this portfolio of seed-stage experiments that are now starting to get into the marketplace.”

Among the innovations P&G has on display in Las Vegas is a Gillette razor blade that heats up in about a second, a smart Oral B toothbrush that visually guides one through optimal teeth cleaning and the Opté Precision Skincare system, as Advertising Age reports. Opté uses a digital camera to help determine the right amount of makeup to apply, which is about 5% “of the normal foundation,” Pritchard notes. “So your skin looks natural without all that makeup.”

P&G has access to some 275,000 startups, according to Pritchard, although it doesn’t work with all of them. The 130 startups are under the aegis of P&G Ventures.

At the retail level, P&G is showcasing the future of beauty retailing in the form of the SK-II Future X Smart Store, which launched in Tokyo in May 2018 and then in Shanghai and Singapore. It’s built around the concept of merging the physical and digital retail environment, beginning with a face scan in a booth that produces five key metrics for specific skin-care treatment, as CNET writes.

The overarching goal is to provide “irresistible superiority” over competitors.

With Olay Skin Advisors, users take a selfie and then technology “diagnoses your skin’s age versus your actual age, which is a frightening experience by the way,” says Pritchard.

He hopes P&G is setting examples for other marketers looking to operate as though they were startups as opposed to big, established legacy companies. At CES, he participated in a panel discussion with P&G Chief Research, Development and Innovation Officer Katy Fish, with whom Pritchard is “joined at the hip. It’s not a silo anymore between R&D and marketing. It is an integrated teamwork to create the experiences, and that’s what I suggest other people do.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

This week, Comscore announced an expansion of its deal with Nexstar, the second-largest TV broadcaster, provide measurement and ad sales currency for all Nexstar markets, including the stations recently acquired from Media General, as Broadcasting & Cable reports. In addition, Comscore will provide local measurement for E.W. Scripps stations and Gray Television, the latter calling for Comscore to be used exclusively in 80 of its 91 markets.

Wiener, who took over as CEO in the spring of 2018, local broadcasters are looking to compete more effectively with the likes of Facebook and Google.

“They want advanced targeting, and we are the solution that’s going to allow the local TV stations and the advertisers to do more granular targeting and try and reach customers for advertisers in more efficient ways,” says Wiener in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

Nexstar will be one of the first broadcasters to deploy Comscore’s advanced cross-platform data attribution and audience measurement across its broadcast and digital platforms, including linear TV, mobile, and desktop devices, including OTT content consumption. Comscore plans to begin integrating linear and digital datasets in local TV markets in 2019.

According to Wiener, one major point of differentiation for Comscore is its census footprint from set-top boxes in 30 million homes that produce data that are overlayed with other data for granular targeting.

Instead of advertisers buying on age and gender they can “reach somebody whose car lease expires in three months. When you buy on Facebook or Google, you’re doing the latter,” Wiener adds.

“That’s important for local but that’s also important in the national market when you start to think about cross platform, when you think about addressable, when you think about some of the advanced TV things that are happening with OpenAP and others.”

He sees what’s happening at the local level to be a harbinger of what’s in store for national TV.

“I’d say the biggest competitor that we have was inertia. We see what’s happening in local now in being that major step that is going to push us from being a planning currency to a buying currency in many areas both on the local and the national market,” says Wiener.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Instead of “iterating on media plans year over year,” companies should take a fresh look and contemplate how they would build a new brand today and before deciding how to go to market,.

“And I think that is one of the best learnings that a marketer can get today from those direct to consumer brands,” says Hofstetter, who joined Comscore as President in October of 2018 from the 360i agency.

Citing the “migration to the big screen,” she notes the “migration to the big screen” and the need to consider the various ways that consumers are receiving content.

Direct-to-consumer marketers would take the approach of an “if I were inventing that brand today point of view. How can I get the same kind of targeting and measurability from TV that I was getting from digital. And I think they’re doing a fantastic job.”

While first-party data is more important than ever for engaging with customers, Hofstetter says it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition.

“It’s really fun to work with companies that have richer data sets, but they’re not necessarily nearly as necessary depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Yes, they have tremendous rich data sets, and that’s great for targeting.

“But I would say the vast amount of data that’s available today actually can be used to help target no matter what you have. I think there are a lot of big companies today that are short on first-party data, and it doesn’t necessarily put them at a disadvantage if they think about it the right way.”

While she attends CES in part to help elevate the Comscore brand, the annual event lets people think more out of the box.

“When you’re here, you get to take out the craziness of the day to day. You have an opportunity to really take a fresh look at your business and think ‘I probably need a more modern approach to how I’m looking at my data from a planning, executing and measurement perspective,’ and the receptivity has been wonderful.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019.   The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal.  For more coverage, please visit this page. 

“What’s different about them is they come to the TV investment process with data of their own” typically consisting of e-commerce conversion data, CEO Baker says of direct-to-consumer marketers. Dataxu’s OneView identity and data management platform can “turn that into a TV plan,” he explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“That’s one of the big trends in advanced TV in 2019 and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen our revenue go up forty times year over year from connected TV.”

Already comfortable with a data-driven marketing process, newer users of the company’s TouchPoint demand-side platform seek to leverage all of their online and mobile data in new channels.

“Many of them have seen things like Facebook or Google search sort of saturate as a play for conversions, and so they’re very interested in not only the branding aspects of TV but also the ability to drive return on investment for new customer acquisition.”

Nine years ago, long before the concept of advanced TV, demand-side platform TouchPoint was dataxu’s starting point. Along the way the company found that most marketers had a problem with connecting the dots between targeting and measurement on PC’s and mobile phones. OneView, which solves for this and can now factor in streaming devices and connected TV, “has really been the center point of our growth in TV and addressable TV,” Baker says.

Consumer device identity is a problem shared by the sell-side, as evidenced by dataxu’s involvement with media sellers like Sky in the U.K. “So on the sell-side, we’re increasingly working with some of the big media companies to help them on attribution and media planning that merges digital and linear data.”

In addition to direct-to-consumer brands, agencies with billings between $50 million and $100 million that never developed big TV teams, are bringing some of their clients into advanced TV. Baker predicts that some of the biggest agencies will be joining in as well.

“What’s been holding them back has been a little bit of uncertainty around who owns converged TV” within those agencies, Baker says.

As for a misconception that advanced TV cannot be done at scale, he adds, “I think at CES we’ll be talking a lot about the fact that you can and a lot of people are doing it today.”

Update: NBCU’s Yaccarino Issues Call To Action On Advertising Standards

On Jan. 7, NBCUniversal sales chief Linda Yaccarino cited “privacy issues, data misuse, measurement chaos and brand safety neglect” at “major digital advertising platforms” while seeking industry unity for high business standards.

“For decades, audiences have loved premium content, and advertisers have trusted networks’ multiscreen advertising ecosystems,” Yaccarino said in an article published on the NBCU website. “That’s why the premium media industry has refused to compromise its core values for how that content is created and distributed, even as we disrupt legacy mindsets and reinvent how we operate.”

Among other benefits, lowering barriers to entry for marketers to engage in TV advertising has attracted direct-to-consumer brands, Yaccarino noted.

“Already what had been an exclusive space for established companies is now welcoming a wave of entrepreneurs whose disruptive brands had long been at a disadvantage against larger incumbents. But here’s the best part: The marketplace is opening up without any compromises on consumers’ or brands’ safety.”

She called for all media publishers, agencies and platforms “to raise standards to let a safer, smarter, more accessible advertising ecosystem take flight.”

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

The house of brands is now more unified than ever following the consolidation of sales efforts this fall under Ferro, who is President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships in a unit called Disney Advertising Sales. In this interview with Beet.TV, Ferro recalls taking over the ABC/Disney/Freeform portfolio about 18 months ago and having happy advertisers respond “Where’s ESPN?”

At that point, “we slowly started working toward understand that this was going to come together because the marketplace was asking for it,” she says of the inclusion of ESPN in the unified sales structure.

“It really is about bringing all the best of the brands and storytelling of the Walt Disney Company together so that advertisers can reach audiences across all dayparts, all lifestyles, all genres, in the best way possible.”

Asked about differentiation from other multi-brand publishers, Ferro says it all comes down to one word: Disney.

“I think when you talk about data and technology, everyone has their flavor. I think the difference is Disney. The way we tell stories and connections we have with our fans and our brands, no company has that,” says Ferro. “You name it, we talk to that audience. It’s great storytelling that has really differentiated us and I think bringing it all together only allows us to really accelerate what that’s going to be for partnerships and brands.”

Now that advertising sales, data and technology sit under the purview of Kevin Mayer, who is Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer and International, the company’s products and services are now aligned “under one opportunity to make sure that we can sell you across the portfolio and you have visibility to that. So we’ll have better metrics, better targeting, we’re building out better vendor relationships and better technology partners.”

One recent tech change was Disney ending its involvement with FreeWheel in favor of Google Ad Manager to manage and deliver all online ad campaigns. Disney has worked with both FreeWheel and Google Ad Manager in the past, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

The efforts under Mayer will “allow more visibility, more targeting, better metrics and also allow us to launch new products like programmatic linear television, which we’ll be bringing to market,” Ferro says.

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

In this interview with Beet.TV roughly a month into her new role at the measurement company, Hofstetter talks about Comcore’s doubling down on offerings like its Comscore Campaign Ratings and what’s needed to move cross-platform unification ahead.

“The question that has been brewing has really been a big question on the buy side. There have been silos. There’s TV buying, there’s digital buying and then there’s that premium that sits in that purgatory in between,” says Hofstetter, who until September of 2018 was Chairwoman of marketing agency 360i.

“Consequently, media partners have tried to aligned themselves to the buyers. So we’ve had a little bit of a breakdown in the ecosystem and that has inhibited a lot of the movement towards looking at video more cross-platform.”

Measurement providers want to see things go cross-platform, “but the buy-side’s not always organized for that,” she adds.

“I think the more we can get better video, better targeting, better cross platform, better de-duplication, the more we’ll be able to proliferate and help advance that.”

In speaking with marketers, media partners and agencies, Hofstetter has found that “everybody has their own perception of what Comscore is and what they do. And if I just say we’re here to bring trust and transparency to media and marketing to use data to drive growth, that is true but it doesn’t explain the how.

“So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us, call it in the next six months, to better educate the marketplace on who we are, the benefits that we provide and then bring that to market and deliver on the promises.”

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

“That’s because there’s not only the interest but the capability and also the audience. This will be the first time as we go into the video season that you have those things together,” Rozen says in this interview with Beet.TV.

He separates advanced TV into three buckets, beginning with its increasingly programmatic nature for automated buying.

“We’re really excited about the programmatic television, and that scale is growing ridiculously fast. We’re able to do more and more today to address more individuals than ever before,” says Rozen.

The world of smart TV sets occupies Rozen’s second bucket. He cites a “cacophony of partners and players” that are providing technologies and platforms that enable IP targeting, tracking co-viewing and listening and understanding what’s being displayed.

All of this information can be used to retarget viewers or for “individualized household delivery of nuanced creative because I know who you are versus somebody else,” Rozen says.

Third is OTT disruption of the traditional linear broadcast TV model and the advanced advertising opportunities created along the way.

Prior to joining 360i this summer, Rozen was at OMD, where he drove all digital and innovation activities, including Ignition Factory (trend spotting), Zero Code (gaming and virtual reality) and OMD’s mobile and social divisions. Now he’s helping to scale the media capabilities of the agency that has a deep heritage in search and now integrates creative and media capabilities.

Clients, says Rozen, are trying to understand the shift from such historical TV measures as reach and frequency with GRP’s in mind to being able to correlate ad impressions with sales. Historical comparisons of reach and frequency must yield to used advanced identity tools and media selection “and then be able to attribute that to a direct sale.”

While 360i’s roots are in performance, “We have been driving very quickly beyond that to be a full-service agency, which is refreshing, exciting and certainly I think ripe for where the market’s going as media and creative really need to be tied together more closely,” Rozen says.

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

“What we have seen over the past twelve months is almost like a smoothing out of the market,” the EVP of Advanced Advertising explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “A lot of that starts with the question around who do I want to reach.”

In February, it will be two years since Fox, Viacom and Turner launched the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to facilitate the creation of common segments across publishers, including NBCUniversal and Univision.

Besides the cost and inconvenience of targeting specific audiences publisher by publisher, the lack of common segments had “held back the notion of driving currencies across television publishers that are now anchored in advanced segments instead of traditional demography,” says Gordon.

To underscore the emerging mindset among larger, more sophisticated advertisers, he recounts a recent meeting with a marketer for which the adoption and integration of advanced-TV techniques happens in the planning phase. The marketer was launching three sets of products in 2019 had “lined up different approaches to media buying and different KPIs against all of those.”

It’s also an example of how more campaigns are bringing together media and creative so that “for the distinct custom audience segments that they are building for these product launches, every distinct segment has a distinct creative,” says Gordon.

He goes on to explain how the investments Viacom has made in its Vantage targeting and optimization offerings are “not just about optimizing against linear inventory on a national basis but we have the capability to extend optimized linear campaigns into addressable inventory,” be it MVPD, OTT or other VOD inventory.

“When you can do that, not only can you do things like truly understand how to maximize reach against an individual audience segment, but you can also really start to understand how a particular creative is performing against a segment and against the KPI that you’re trying to drive.”

Vantage has primarily been oriented toward optimizing for either audience concentration as a KPI or achieving de-duplicated reach, according to Gordon. But Viacom is seeing a move toward what he terms outcome optimization.

“Maybe I’m driving a campaign where I’m trying to get people to sign up for a service, product or whatever. We now have this ability to actually look at the outcome data, conversion data, plug that back into the optimization process and throughout the campaign start to actually optimize for that outcome and for that strategic audience segment,” says Gordon.

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

Disney+ will be the third piece of a direct-to-consumer triad when combined with ESPN+, which launched last April, and Disney’s stake in Hulu, the President of Advertising Sales & Sponsorships explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“On the Disney side, while we are not doing advertising at launch right now, we are doing marketing partnerships around how we can actually bring brands together that we’ve done broadly with the company,” Ferro says.

Disney believes that direct-to-consumer, which requires a new approach to content allocation, which in Disney’s case includes pulling its movies and shows from Netflix next year, gives both consumers and advertisers the best opportunities.

“What you saw in the launch of that product was the quickness of adoption,” Ferro says of ESPN+, which provided access to more mainstream and “unique” sports like boxing. “Five months in we announced we were at a million subscribers and we’ve only grown from there.”

She describes Disney+ as “a broad, general entertainment brand for families” built around proven entities like Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney and National Geographic.

The third leg of the direct-to-consumer stool is Hulu, the unprofitable streaming pioneer that will be 60% owned by Disney at the beginning of 2019 by virtue of its acquisition of Twenty-First Century Fox. Hulu is where ABC and Freeform programming resides, with ad-supported “live and on-demand content in season,” says Ferro.

“We’re also working very closely obviously with our product groups and our events groups and our parks and movie promotions teams,” she says of the company’s direct-to-consumer initiatives.

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.

The bottom line is that consumers need system interoperability, not “essentially closed loops” but one particular operation system across devices, Balis explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

And then there’s the television business. “I think television follows the same parallel here. In this case, it’s the advertiser that needs interoperability,” says Balis. “And they really need interoperability at scale. So the worst thing we can do is fragment all of these different sources of supply.”

Bringing things together and infusing it with data would produce standards so that people “can make intelligent decisions about what media they can or cannot find value in.”

Whether it’s open platforms or walled gardens, at the end of the day what facilitates fluidity in marketplaces is what wins, according to Balis. “I think we have to be able to connect supply and demand in a way that’s objective, that’s infused with data and ultimately that allows you to compare one piece of inventory with another. Fundamentally I think walled gardens make it harder to do that. It implies some layer of comparison that we’re going to have to make across walled gardens.”

EY fundamentally believes in building a better working world, with TV being no exception even if it means competitors working together. “Data and technology fundamentally connect everything. I think the big question is, if everyone’s innovating in a vacuum, we may not get to answers as an industry as quickly as if we come together.”

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

While a lot of progress has been made in the last several years, “there’s still too many people that want to own their own solutions, own their own data,” Castree says in this interview with Beet.TV in the walkup to CES 2019. “So we’re seeing a lot of advanced television silos pop up, which makes it more challenging and less simple to aggregate that back up for marketers.”

Formerly the Global CEO of GroupM’s Wavemaker agency, Castree took on his new role earlier this month, as AdExchanger reports. The CEO position had been held by Brian Lesser, who joined AT&T in 2017 to build an advertising and analytics platform for the data and content assets the company would acquire from Time Warner.

Castree sees too many publishers that want to create their own end-to-end solution comprising data, inventory and technology “and sell it bundled in a package.” Hence GroupM’s focus on collaboration, consortiums and a “disaggregation of technology, inventory and data so we can re-aggregate more bespoke solutions for individual advertisers.”

Judging by market mix modeling and performance attribution, “video is still the top of the performance stack” but it’s a fragmented world of premium video distribution.

Stressing the importance of scale, particularly for mass-marketed products, advertisers can’t always target their way to growth, according to Castree. Within that scale lies the ability to add targeting layers and dynamic creative optimization to find “more interesting, nuanced and targeted ways to reach certain segments of those audiences.”

Asked about marketers’ understanding the value proposition behind addressable and other forms of audience targeting, given the incremental cost of creative, data and technology, Castree adds, “I think some advertisers understand it very well and others don’t. Everybody understands it conceptually.”

This video is part the Beet.TV preview series ‘The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu.  For more videos, please visit this page.